A continuation of acclaimed debut project/album 'HADES' theme of displacement, Eternal Recurrence by composer & artist Constantine Skourlis is a haunting AV (audio video) installation featuring original footage by Embassy For The Displaced (EFTD) and edited by Georgia Arvaniti in collaboration with the artist. Co-commissioned by Bedouin Records and Beton7 Gallery.

Constantine Skourlis about HADES & Eternal Recurrence:

The idea for the project was initially conceived while I was living in a remote island called Teledos, for a year and a half, spending most of my time on foley recording excursions, particularly in the nearby islands of Kalymnos and Lesbos. During an early trip, we descended deep down a fifteen meter half broken, rusted ladder, and an intense feeling of stillness and emptiness rushed through me. Reaching the bottom, I realized we were in a really ancient place, untouched by time. I imagined how the Ancient Greeks must have felt as they encountered their version of the Underworld, Hades. Lesbos is known for its huge storms during the winter, and I spent many days recording them. These two conditions––recording from inside the cave, and storms––represented two extremes in the most organic way. A year after my time on the island, Lesbos became an arrival point for refugees. The recordings took on a new meaning, serving as a constant driving force and somber reminder of the reality of life on Lesbos now, of all the innocent lives being lost in the biggest humanitarian crisis in recent memory.

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Words by Stefanos Levidis (EFTD):

According to some accounts, the name ‘Europeʼ stands for ‘where the sun setsʼ. The origin of the word may be deriving from the Akkad ‘erebu’, which translates as ‘to go down, set’, ‘erebʼ the Phoenician word for ‘eveningʼ, or the primordial Greek deity of Erebus – Έρεβος, ‘deep darkness, shadow’ – a liminal place of darkness between earth and Hades.

Such an etymological turn is particularly interesting to consider within the context of contemporary migration, as it invites us to position ourselves east of the continent, on the shores of Asia Minor and the Levant, now dotted with overcrowded internment camps, and look westward, towards the sunset, and across the same sea that today acts as a deterrent for so many. Over the past decade, the maritime space between Europe, Asia and Africa has become one of liminality, diaspora, and displacement. The strategic positioning of spaces for the documentation, interception and holding of migrants and refugees around the Mediterranean basin in Northern Africa and the Middle East, and the subsequent search for more remote and ever-deadlier routes on the part of those who attempt to cross it, hint towards an understanding of European migration management policies as a carefully architectured necropolitical project, if not a blatant affirmation of a recent and still resonant colonial past. The Mediterranean sea, with its territorial waters, contiguous and contested economic zones, patrol areas and shorelines, that historically 'signal a world of mobilities, betweenness, instabilities, encounters and becomingsʼ has been increasingly militarised by European authorities, and as such it has been rendered into a buffer zone, a ‘moat' to the European ‘citadelʼ. It has been made to absorb, to deter, and to kill. A post-colonial abyss, a Black Mediterranean.

As Europe is once again becoming the geography of a long dusk, the subjects that are pushed to its shadows, and the people standing in solidarity with them, might find value in entertaining and mobilising this darkness to come. It is within this absence of light, in the fissures and disjunctions in the sovereign state, that one might attempt a flight, a strategic retreat from the stratifying territorial arrangements of the European border management project. If the contemporary national state is a project of soil, we must insist on locating on more liquid ground, where possibilities of disaffiliation, racial and national ‘contamination' and fluid frontiers open up.

It is from within this liquid darkness, emblematised by the belly of the boat, the ‘wombʼ that delivered so many bodies to the unknown, that the Martinican philosopher and poet Edouard Glissant proposes a strategy for ‘opacity'. Glissant developed his work Poetics of Relation within the context of a postcolonial Carribbean, yet his logic resonates heavily with the ebbs and flows of what has come to be called ‘the refugee crisisʼ; the lower in the deck one agrees to go, the cheaper the fare smugglers charge for a crossing to Lampedusa, to Malta, to Chios, or Lesvos.

As a response to the intensification of such crossings over the past year-and-a-half, the Aegean archipelago, the sea that separates Greece from Turkey, is surveyed, recorded and narrated by a number of optic and sensory regimes. Alongside an aggregation of operational images produced by the machinic vision of the border apparatus, representations of contemporary displacement for humanitarian purposes abound in social and mainstream, sovereign, media. Whether well-intended or not, they form part of a post-colonial gaze, distilled in which are configurations of national and continental identity and empire. A ‘soft evening lightʼ falls on the faces of the people who attempt to cross it – where bodies are stopped, images proliferate.

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Constantine Skourlis BIO:

His work goes beyond the boundaries of conventional music and could be described as a mass of overloaded and piercing sound made of guitars, amplifiers, orchestral instruments, prepared piano, old tube radios and field recordings. Music influenced by metal, classical minimalism and drone. He has participated in a variety of projects in collaboration with recognized artists, choreographers and curators. In addition, he is one of two creators of the "Ekkert" project in collaboration with renowned pianist Christos Sakellaridis. The project's first album was published by Bastakiya Tapes. His work has been presented in prestigious venues and outlets such as Berghain Säule, Sophiensaele Berlin, Dansehallerne Copenhagen, Michael Cacoyannis Foundation, Iannis Xenakis Center, Athens & Epidaurus Festival, Alserkal Avenue Dubai, Onassis Cultural Centre, Beton7 Gallery as well as Fact Magazine, KALTBLUT Magazine, Secret Thirteen, Holland's National Radio, NTS Radio, The National (UAE) and more. In 2017 he collaborated with design-based collective 'Embassy For The Displaced' for an A/V project-performance that debuted at FASMA Festival, Athens. His critically acclaimed debut album 'HADES' that was released on Bedouin Records is an absorbing and ambitious masterpiece that revealed a visionary skill for visceral and dense composition while showcasing a distinctive sonic signature that sounded like nothing else.